Merchant:RedfellasLocation: SwedenSize: 10 locationsPlatforms: Facebook, Instagram, PinMeToBottom Line: Many chains businesses see an increase in social media impressions when they post on local store pages.

The first question most chains and franchise businesses face when they delve into social media marketing is whether to create individual Facebook pages for each local store or to focus on a single, centralized brand page for the entire organization. The team at Swedish restaurant chain Redfellas has taken the first approach, and they’ve been able to boost the number of impressions and views they receive by regularly using a posting tool from the location marketing platform PinMeTo.

“Social media today is more or less the only way to be seen,” says Patrik Westbergen, a partner at Redfellas.

Rather than budgeting for large TV buys, Redfellas is working almost exclusively on using social media for low cost marketing and advertising. Specifically, the Swedish salad and smoothie chain is looking to expand its footprint on Instagram and Facebook with local store pages. Westbergen says his team uses PinMeTo to upload pictures on a set schedule, which they weren’t able to use before they started using the third-party platform.

PinMeTo manages business data on multiple platforms, including search engines, map services, apps, business directories, and recommendation platforms, in addition to social media. The company offers a product called Post Local, which uses dynamic fields to allow chain businesses to post on hundreds of local social media pages, as well.

Although Redfellas currently has fewer than a dozen locations, the business is in expansion mode and manually posting on multiple Facebook accounts each day was a tedious process that often got overlooked by the small social media marketing team. After consistently using PinMeTo’s posting tools for 25 days, Redfellas was able to generate more than a million unpaid impressions — 1,006,342, to be exact — which is an increase of 227% from the previous month. When Redfellas started using PinMeTo a year ago, the company was seeing around 85,000 monthly views.

For Westbergen, it’s really about the time involved in posting to 10+ local store pages. He says he’s most impressed with how much less time it takes to manage Redfellas’s social media accounts with the help of a third-party tool.

“We spend about 10% to 20% of the time [on social media] that we did before we were working with PinMeTo,” he says.

Despite his positivity about Redfellas’s latest push into social media, Westbergen is cognizant of the fact that social media marketing isn’t for every business. In addition to his roll at Redfellas, Westbergen is also a partner in a Swedish bed store chain, and he says traditional marketing with printed magazines and TV ads has been far more effective than social media for that company. But that’s not the case for Redfellas, which has a much lower price point and a larger base of loyal, repeat customers. Westbergen points to McDonalds as another chain that’s been able to find enormous success with local social media pages.

Going forward, Westbergen would like to see more syncing and development between social media platforms. He’ll continue using third-party location marketing platforms to streamline digital marketing tasks, as well.

“Working with professionals who [understand] this thing is probably the biggest lesson I received,” he says. “Before we fought without success, now we toil less and get better results.”